Technical

Posted on 3 October 2017 by Paul McGonigle, Solution Architect & Technical Lead

SharePoint now has limited support for Webhooks. Our Technical Lead, Paul McGonigle, explores how they can be used, and whether they’re worth using.

New features get added to SharePoint Online regularly, and I find it’s worth staying on top of them so we can keep our solutions cutting-edge at CompanyNet. One of the new features I’ve been digging into recently is Webhooks. Webhooks are HTTP callbacks that are automatically triggered when something happens. At the moment, support for Webhooks in SharePoint is limited to SharePoint lists.

On first glance, they seemed like they might fill a void in the SharePoint online developer toolset. I took the opportunity to explore Webhooks with a real-world scenario, and found several oddities with working with them.Continue reading this post »

Want to push data directly to the cloud using the Power BI API but not sure where to start? Our handy guide will help you get the basics under your belt.

Power BI can connect to a wide variety of systems to collect data to drive reports and dashboards. But what if we want to consolidate data from multiple locations, such as a large number of dynamically created SharePoint lists, into a single dataset?

You might be tempted to first consolidate this data into a location such as Azure SQL, before connecting to that SQL database from Power BI. However, this isn’t actually necessary, as we can use Power BI’s own API to create a dataset into which we can push data directly, removing the need for a separate database.

This blog post outlines the steps involved in using the Power BI API to manage data. These are:

Our Lync server caused us months of pain. So we took it out to a yard and smashed it up.

Watching the video above, you might be left scratching your head. What would drive the mild-mannered employees of a successful IT business to commit an act of wanton destruction against an innocent server?

Look again. That server is anything but innocent. It’s the Sangoma Lync Express, and we hate it.

If you’ve ever tried to set up and use your own Lync server for voice communications, you might be nodding your head rather than scratching it. The destruction was a moment of pure catharsis – the purging of two years of pent-up frustration at an infuriating piece of technology that caused our business hours of pain and grief and cost.

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Here you’ll find insight on CompanyNet’s work, what’s happening in enterprise software, and the future of the workplace. It’s written by a variety of CompanyNet staff. If you’d like to talk to us about anything you see here, just drop us a line.